Got my hair cut, it no longer looks like a bush and after a quick (but expensive) spin round Asda I have some new shoes, a new t-shirt (with cool Space Invaders logo on) and a bit of food.

This holiday has been good, I’ve been off to France on holiday, sorted out my website, seen friends and generally had time off. It would have been good to have completed a project that I’ve been meaning to do for years which is build a MAME cabinet, however I lack the space in my house to put one.

I have all the parts, I just need the wood and space to put one. I’m getting rid of a big TV to my sister’s so maybe I could put one in its’ place.

One of the walks we went on started from Le Tour and went over the Aiguillette des Possettes after a brief wander into Switzerland. The weather was excellent, being neither too hot nor too cold, clear and sunny all day. The terrain was fairly easy to walk over too. Here’s today’s selection from a much larger set.

The summit

Mont Blanc through the trees

A cairn

The Swiss border

Mont Blanc from Le Tour

Since I have taken a lot of photos, I’m going to be spending the next few days picking out the best and displaying them here.

To begin, here are photos from my cable car trip up the Aiguille Du Midi

The lower viewing platform

The summit of the Aiguille Du Midi

Hanging Icicles

Looking down towards Chamonix

The Aiguille Du Midi cablecar station

Vertigo

Welcome aboard EasyJet flight Screaming Baby 592 from Liverpool to Geneva. On your flight today you will spend more time waiting in the airport than on the plane itself. Upon reaching Geneva, remember we have landed in Switzerland and not France.

After failing to buy a new mobile phone we zoomed off to the airport, got on our plane full of shouting children and were transported to Geneva. From there we caught a bus to Chamonix.

The hostel is quite basic, but has all the essentials - warmth, lighting, electricity, water and free Wifi conveniently provided by some wifi transmitter nearby. My N810 fails to connect consistently, but my dad’s Eee PC is quite happy.

I’ve just managed to extract the GPS route from my GPS and have it on my N810, unfortunately I can’t upload it to any mapping sites because it takes too long and the connection dies. Guess I’ll have to keep them until I get back and upload then.

Chamonix is an interesting place, containing people from pretty much every nationality we’ve got. There’s lots of places to eat and buy tourist crap from, and a giant muddy river running through the middle. Supposedly there’s some large hills or something around it, but all I saw was cloud

Tomorrow we’re off for a walk up something high and steep if the weather is good. I’m charging my camera batteries as we speak. I hope I have enough memory space to store all the photos! I think I have about 7GB of space spread over all the various memory cards I own, and with this Eee I can copy things around.

Assuming this wifi holds out, I’ll continue posting

Here we go… just a few days left, then Summer Holiday.

Me and Amy are in South Wales paying a visit to Jeff and Giles and their menagerie. The weather has been warm and nice all day, making the trip more enjoyable. The route down was fairly straight forward, no major traffic or route finding problems; I had my Nokia N810 and Maemo-Mapper telling me wnere to go.

Apart from paying Jeff a visit, our other reason for coming this far down was to collect The TV - one of the other YakYak forum members known simply as ‘Mr Dom’ had a 46″ rear projection telly that he didn’t want. It needs checking over by a TV repair man, having colour convergence problems, but is supposed to be OK otherwise. In need of a new telly I said I’d have it.

I drive a Fiat Panda, one of the newer ones. Not the biggest cars going. I now know my car’s boot space is exactly the same size as a 46″ rear projection telly. Using sokoban and Tetris skills, we got it to fit… just. My knees almost touch the dashboard. It’s like riding cattle class in a plane.

Jeff’s place is a nice colloection of old and new tech, sheep, llamas and other fluffy things. We’ve been introduced to the beasties and the perculiarities of his giant plasma telly.

It’s May Bank Holiday - the traditional time to either spend hours in your car going somewhere, a day lying in the sun, or having a barbequeue. Traditionally the day is supposed to start with the exclamation of “oh great, it’s raining”. Not today though.

Me and Amy went to visit our good friend Beerman for the day for a Texmex barbequeue. There was plenty of meat, lovingly prepared earlier that morning by the one and only MetalChef, Johnny.

There was also fire…

I must make a mental note to hide anything flammable the next time Amy comes round to visit

I actually had a proper day “off” today. I wasn’t woken by my alarm, I had nowhere to go and spent most of the morning lying in bed safe in the knowledge that I won’t be at work tomorrow. I did do quite a bit of tidying and sorting out of my crap though, and in the evening went and jumped in the recycling bin to crush it all down, but that was about it.

That’s school done for two weeks. Cleverly I’ve left my laptop at work so there’s no chance for me to do any work while on holiday. I’ll go back during the second week of holiday to do it all, that way there’ll be no distractions and I’ll actually get work done.

Just one week to go before the end of term, and two weeks off. Of course I will be spending some of this time planning the next term’s worth of work, but on the whole it’ll be a nice two week break.

I think I’m slowly crafting my year 10 groups that I have last thing on a Friday into nice, quiet sessions. It’s Friday, it’s the last lesson and everyone wants to go home, so how about we all just get on with some work in quiet and make the time pass quickly. It mostly seems to work.